Gordon Brown: It is true that the photograph taken on the day this country left the exchange rate mechanism and had to impose 15 per cent. interest rates shows that, standing next to the then Chancellor, was the policy adviser who happens now to be a candidate for the Conservative leadership. People will not forget the 15 per cent. interest rates imposed by members of the previous Government, nor that we had 10 per cent. interest rates for more than four years under that Government. Under this Government, interest rates in Britain have averaged 5 per cent., and have recently come down. We will continue to follow the advice that we should create jobs in communities where there has been dereliction. I do not know about junction 29A, but I hope to visit it sometime in the future.

Gordon Brown: That is exactly what we have been trying to achieve. If the hon. Gentleman has read the IMF communiqué and, before that, the G7 communiqué, he will know that their emphasis was on avoiding the corruption that had been a feature of some regimes in recent years. We want to move from conditionality being imposed by rich countries on poor countries to one of proper accountability of the rulers to their people in those countries. The transparency that is achieved through that will be the best safeguard against corruption.
	Yes, an anti-corruption drive is part of this, but we will also push further to ensure that the money actually goes to health and education. The hon. Gentleman should be encouraged that, of the countries that have received debt relief in the past few weeks, Mozambique has announced that money from debt relief will go to health and education, Tanzania has announced that it wants to complete its programme of making primary and secondary education free for its school children, and other countries have announced that they want money to go to infrastructure. The progress that has been made both by the international community and within the countries to ensure that there is an environment that does not tolerate corruption, insists on transparency and ensures that debt relief goes to poverty reduction is something that we should applaud and continue to monitor.

John McFall: The Chancellor will be aware of the trade justice early-day motion that was tabled this week that referred to the worthy aims of fair trade and the elimination of poverty. He will also realise that a lot hangs on the World Trade Organisation talks in Hong Kong and, not least, economic reform in Europe with the bloated common agricultural policy programme. What measures does he have for me to take to a trade justice campaign meeting on Friday so that I can reassure my constituents that the Government are on the right track to ensure that poverty is eliminated and becomes a thing of the past?

Tim Loughton: If the Paymaster General were the finance director of a company that last year had overpaid its dividend by about £2 billion—representing a sixth in additional money—and had then told recipients that it was perfectly okay for them to spend that money, but subsequently had to write menacing letters to those people to say that they must pay the money back, even through that threatened them with dire financial circumstances, does she think that she would be entitled to keep her job?

Angela Eagle: It sounds as if my right hon. Friend already knows, but may I caution her not to take the Conservative party's advice on tax credits? We should remember that people have to be in work if they are to benefit. The solution of the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) would help only the rich. Will she keep in perspective what is happening in my constituency, where 12,500 children are benefiting? Although there are difficulties, which the Department is working out when they are brought to her attention, will she persist and realise that tax credits often give lone parents their first opportunities in many years—opportunities that the Conservative party never gave them—to earn their own living and to look forward to making progress in life instead of rotting on the benefits on which they were left by the Conservatives?

Kerry McCarthy: Is the Minister aware that, although some of our banks and building societies have embraced that agenda, there is clear anecdotal evidence that other institutions have tried to offload that responsibility by, for example, telling potential customers that they do not have the forms or staff available to process the accounts? Does he agree that it is disgraceful that some of our most profitable institutions are seeking to evade their responsibility and can he assure me that steps will be taken to ensure that all our banking institutions have a responsibility to provide basic bank accounts for people on low incomes?

Des Browne: I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman for the reasons that I gave in my answer to the hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink). If the figures that he quotes are accurate—I do not have access to them at the moment—America must be 117th.

Gordon Brown: I should like to inform the House that the international finance facility for immunisation has been launched bythe UK, France, Italy, Spain and Sweden. With the backing of the Gates Foundation, it will provide an additional $4 billion over the next 10 years for vaccination against some of the deadliest diseases in the world's poorest countries. It is estimated that, through this facility alone, the lives of 5 million adults and children will be saved.

Jim Cousins: May I draw my right hon. Friend's attention to remarks that our right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary made last night on "Newsnight", which appeared to suggest that British forces in southern Iraq are free under certain circumstances, and with the approval of local commanders on the ground, to operate over the border with Iran. That is a serious matter, which, notwithstanding the statement made by our right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence last week, must be clarified to the House as soon as possible.

Peter Hain: With permission, Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a statement about developments in Northern Ireland during the summer recess period. First, however, I know that the House will want to join me in marking, with sadness, the passing of two very significant figures from the Northern Ireland political stage: Mo Mowlam and Gerry Fitt. They were politicians of great courage, passion and, above all, humanity and we all in different ways feel their loss.
	On 28 July we saw the statement by the IRA that its leadership had ordered an end to its armed campaign. As I said in my letter to Members at the time, that was important—indeed, historic—but it was crucial that the words were carried through in actions, which had to be independently verified. Two weeks ago, the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning reported that the IRA had placed its arms completely and verifiably beyond use.
	Not so many years ago, Unionists and republicans were agreed on one thing at least—that the IRA would never give up its guns and never give up its explosives: "not a bullet; not an ounce". But the impossible has happened and the war machine that brought death and destruction to thousands of people in Northern Ireland, Great Britain and beyond—indeed, to this House—has gone. It is something that all Members of this House have wanted to see happen for many years and that many feared they never would see.
	However, immensely significant as IRA decommissioning undoubtedly is, there is more to be done in demonstrating that the IRA has put paramilitary activity behind it for good. The next formal report from the Independent Monitoring Commission, focusing on paramilitary activity, is expected in the next week or so. That will give an indication of whether progress has been made in meeting the equally important requirement for a verifiable end to all paramilitary and criminal activity. As it will only have covered several weeks since 28 July, the two Governments have asked the IMC to produce an additional report in January to reinforce the crucial verification process.
	The Government believe that the interests of everyone in Northern Ireland are best served by local decision making through a devolved Assembly. That requires the rebuilding of trust and confidence and we recognise that that will take time. If the IMC reports confirm an end to IRA activity, the time will have come to move the process forward.
	The summer also saw a murderous loyalist feud, vicious attacks on the police and Army by loyalist paramilitaries and sickening sectarian attacks, including obscene threats to desecrate graves in Carnmoney cemetery—all of which disfigured Northern Ireland in the eyes of the world. Of course, that outrageous behaviour appalled the overwhelming majority of people in the Unionist community and I greatly welcomed the opportunity to stand with the hon. Member for North Antrim (Rev. Ian Paisley) in his constituency, which had seen sectarian attacks on schools, and join him in condemning such barbarous behaviour. It has taken a long time for the republican movement to acknowledge that violence does not pay. It is high time that the loyalist paramilitaries learned that too. My decision last month to specify the Ulster Volunteer Force/Red Hand Commando sent out a clear signal to those who would persist with that philosophy that they are wrong and that they must stop immediately.
	There remains outstanding the question whether a financial penalty should be imposed on the Progressive Unionist party following the recommendation made to me earlier in the year by the IMC. I intend to watch developments carefully over the next few months, in particular the role that the PUP plays in attempting to secure peace and stability in the loyalist community, before reaching a decision on this in the context of the January report from the IMC, to which I referred earlier.
	With my deputy the Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr. Hanson), I have been visiting loyalist communities and meeting community representatives, clergy, teachers and local residents. Where any community has legitimate concerns, we will address them, but it is equally important that there is political leadership to enable those communities to join in the huge progress that Northern Ireland has made in recent years.
	The summer also demonstrated beyond doubt that there is one organisation that we can all rely on to uphold the right of everyone to live in peace. Officers of the Police Service of Northern Ireland displayed exemplary courage and professionalism in protecting life and preserving order, despite being attacked with live rounds, blast bombs, petrol bombs and other missiles. We should be under no illusion, following the Whiterock parade, that loyalist paramilitaries were clearly intent on murdering police officers. Police videos also showed some Orangemen taking off their collarettes and hurling rocks at the police front lines—behaviour that I know that the vast majority in the Orange Order deplore.
	Even with those vicious attacks on them—and let us not forget that nearly 100 officers sustained serious injuries in a single weekend—the police remained committed to their task. However, they can be effective only if they receive the support of all sections of the community in Northern Ireland. Time and again, those officers have demonstrated their determination to protect all the citizens of Northern Ireland. It is time that everyone in Northern Ireland—from Sinn Fein to the Orange Order to loyalist communities—acknowledged that and got behind the police to support them in doing their job.
	The transformation of policing in Northern Ireland in line with the Patten reforms is one of the great success stories of the Good Friday agreement. It has led to the policing arrangements in Northern Ireland being admired around the world as a model for change. We remain fully committed to that model for the future.
	A key element in that success is the role played by the Policing Board. I can tell the House today that I have decided to reconstitute the board from 1 April 2006, with political appointees selected in proportion to the 2003 election results using the d'Hondt formula.
	So what do the months ahead hold for Northern Ireland? The Government will continue to do all that we can to facilitate progress towards restoration, but we hope that all Northern Ireland's politicians will seize the opportunity that this summer's developments present. The Government will also take forward work to implement those aspects of the Belfast agreement where work is incomplete or ongoing. We will, for example, continue to support those bodies and institutions that work for the benefit of Northern Ireland on a north-south, east-west basis.
	Some areas of the joint declaration of 2003 were dependent on acts of completion by the IRA. Difficult though some of those will be for some people to accept, there should be no surprises, as the Government have long made it clear that certain developments would follow on from such acts of completion.
	First, normalisation: in the 2003 joint declaration, the Government set out proposals to normalise the security profile across Northern Ireland when there was an enabling environment. Following the IRA statement, I published an updated programme, on the advice of the Chief Constable and the General Officer Commanding. I want to assure the House that my first and overriding priority—and that of the Chief Constable and the GOC—remains the safety and security of the people of Northern Ireland. We will not do anything that will compromise that, but the security arrangements that we have in place must be in proportion to the level of threat. The normalisation programme published in August, a copy of which I have had placed in the Library, will see the creation of an environment that will allow the return of conventional policing across Northern Ireland, something which all sections of the community should welcome.
	The other commitment set out in the joint declaration was that we would reinvigorate discussions with the political parties on the shared goal of devolving criminal justice and policing. The Government will want to explore the scope for doing that over the months ahead. In the meantime, we will bring forward enabling legislation for later implementation, when there is agreement among the parties in Northern Ireland. We will also take forward plans to appoint a victims commissioner. I very much hope to make an announcement about that shortly, because the many victims of Northern Ireland's troubles deserve much better recognition and support. We will never forget them.
	The House will know that we have undertaken to legislate to deal with the position of individuals connected with paramilitary crimes committed before the Belfast agreement, dealing with those suspects categorised as on-the-runs. As the House will recall, the proposals were published alongside the joint declaration more than two years ago, in May 2003. This is not an amnesty: nevertheless, the implementation of those proposals will be painful for many people. I fully understand that, but the Government believe that it is a necessary part of the process of closing the door on violence forever.
	Notwithstanding the recent turbulence, huge progress has been made this summer. We need to build on that progress. The people of Northern Ireland have shown remarkable patience and resilience over the years. We owe it to them not to be deflected from doing all that we can to see a peaceful, stable and prosperous Northern Ireland, in which all traditions are cherished and respected. They deserve no less.

Julian Lewis: The Secretary of State paid a well-deserved tribute to the bravery of the police, various politicians—both living and no longer living—and the victims. However, one group of people to whom he perhaps inadvertently did not pay tribute was the men and women of the British Army and the security services, without whom we would not be in the position that we are in today. He said that it had taken a long time for the IRA to realise that violence did not pay, but surely the British Army and the security services gave it that realisation. Is it not fortunate that the prescription of those who signed up to the troops out movement at the height of the troubles was ignored by successive Governments?

Peter Hain: Although Father Alec Reid has apparently apologised for his remarks, of course I join the hon. Gentleman in condemning what he said. On the question of on-the-runs, I have explained that when the proposals are ready we will make them available to hon. Members, including him, for debate, scrutiny and, if the House so decides, amendment. The proposition is not an amnesty because that would mean that people who had committed offences would in advance be released for ever from being punished for them. I made it clear in an earlier reply that there will no be an amnesty because such people will be subject to the process of the law. The cold cases that are being reviewed by the Chief Constable and his officers will lead to people being charged, if evidence exists. If such people come under the on-the-runs legislation, they will be subject to the appropriate judicial process, so there is no question of people being let off the hook.

John McDonnell: The emphasis of our debate, in the past and today, is on the care that is needed in the process of proscription. Many of us are worried that, in the past, the provision of information to the House, based on the intelligence services' activities, may not have been all that it should have been. Whenever it is argued that the organisations that we are proscribing seek to overthrow a legitimate Government, we should have a thorough discussion about the legitimacy of that Government. We must be sure that those who are engaged in armed struggle are defined as terrorists. It behoves the Government to provide us with as much information as possible.
	We must have as much information as possible on the role of individual states supporting such organisations and the role that those states played in establishing them, funding them and supporting their activities. That includes the role of our Government in associating with certain organisations that are active across the world. The order is largely based on our trusting the information that comes from the intelligence services. There is deep scepticism about some of that information, certainly since the Iraq invasion and the basis on which intelligence decisions were made at that time.
	I want to refer specifically to the operation of the system after proscription. I shall give the example of a constituent of my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr. Khabra)—Mr. Balbir Singh Bains—whose family reside in my constituency. It is an example of how the system after proscription should not work. In one list we proscribed an organisation called Babba Khalsa, which the Indian Government identify as a terrorist organisation operating in the Punjab and elsewhere. Mr. Bains visited India and was arrested and detained as a result of an alleged association with Babba Khalsa. He had no such association, as we proved subsequently, but it took us two years to do so. In fact, he was an active member of our local gurdwara and was much respected in the community in undertaking religious duties and community activities. Then it was alleged that Babba Khalsa was proscribed because of its association with Mr. Balbir Singh Bains, a known terrorist. The argument becomes circular in such cases. His family contacted me two weeks ago and told me that they understand that his name is still identified in association with the alleged terrorist group, which is still identified on the Foreign Office website. I urge the Minister to take that information on board and to try to rectify the matter. In all that we do, we must ensure that we are careful after a proscription is activated to consider its impact on the lives of individuals.
	I would welcome an opportunity to debate the process by which information on individual organisations is garnered. I understand the problems about how much information can be provided, but it would be useful if we could at least have more about how much comes directly from British intelligence services and how much is provided by the CIA and others, so that we can gauge the motivation of those judgments and reach our own independent judgment.
	I would welcome a longer time scale in terms of the indication of organisations that may be listed for proscription so that we can be more engaged in the debate, if only through informal discussions with the Minister, under Chatham House rules in some instances because of the sensitivity of the information.
	I doubt that there will be a Division. Nevertheless, I caution that on every occasion we tread very carefully when we seek to use information from other agencies and Governments in proscribing organisations in a way that will occasionally have such a direct impact on the lives of our constituents and their families.

Alan Simpson: That was precisely the point that I was about to make. When we debated the initial proscribed list, many of us made the same points. We said that Parliament had been presented with a complete list and that we were unable to consider individual organisations on the list and vote on them separately. We were told that there was provision for appeals, but that is not the same as a parliamentary right to exercise a parliamentary judgment on the legitimacy of a case for inclusion.
	It is dangerous for the democratic process if we start on a path of assuming that Parliament has a right to make lumped-together decisions on composite lists without adequate scrutiny. I would be happy if the list had gone through a separate Committee scrutiny system in the House. I would be happy if there had been a fuller debate in which we were allowed to exercise our judgment organisation by organisation. I might not have liked the decisions that were reached, but at least I could have been confident that our responsibilities for the democratic process had been properly exercised. However, the House is not going about matters in that way and that takes us into dangerous waters, as illustrated by the case that my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) mentioned.
	I am worried by the point that the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) made about organisations on other people's lists. The House has a right to be told what representations other Governments have made to the UK Government about including organisations on a proscribed list. I suspect that if we looked at the United Nations list, it would contain some organisations whose proscription would be unwelcome to the United States of America. I suspect that we do not include any of those organisations on our list. We have a proscription list that is friendly for the current US Administration. There is a dreadful lop-sidedness to that sort of approach.
	If we go through the list, we see that many of the organisations go back to the 1980s. We were not presented with them in the first or the second proscribed list and we must ask what has changed to require their addition to our list of known risks or threats to the UK. The list is littered with expressions such as "have the potential to", "have the capacity to", "they have anti-western views" or "they have anti-American views". Many of us have similar inclinations, but that does not make us terrorist organisations. I was relieved to note that the Socialist Campaign group was not on the list. [Hon. Members: "Not yet."] Indeed. I would not rule it out for all time.

Patrick Mercer: I am grateful for being able to make a small contribution on the most important and dangerous subject facing Parliament at the moment. I am also grateful to be able to endorse the views of my Nottinghamshire colleague, the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson). He has just made an extremely important contribution, which was not trivial in any way, shape or form. I welcome this opportunity because, like the hon. Gentleman, I believe that these organisations need to be considered in detail. We need to have time to debate what they stand for. We should not simply take a block of names, philosophies and confused ideologies, give them a convenient tag, and write them off. We need to look at the matter in detail.
	I shall not oppose the Government today, and I praise the dispatch with which they have now chosen to move, but I wonder why they have taken so long to ban one, two or possibly three organisations that, so far as I can see, probably represent the same thing. I am concentrating particularly on the organisations that call themselves Ansar Al-Islam and Ansar Al Sunna. The Minister might equally have put on the list al-Qaeda in the Country of Two Rivers, and a series of other names by which these organisations go whenever it suits them.
	It is an aphorism I know, but we are not considering concrete organisations. We are considering ideologies and organisations that have more in common with a piece of mercury, which, when hit with a hammer, will split into various different parts and spring up enormously dangerously. As we are concentrating on those organisations—which, it is fair to say, owe their allegiance to Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the gentleman who brings us on the television screen the charming views of Britons' heads being sliced off with bread knives, who is such an expert in handling the media that when we lose one of our aircraft, whether to friendly fire or enemy fire I do not know, has his cameras on the spot within minutes and those images projected across the world within hours, and who runs a propaganda machine far in advance of anything that we seem to be able to handle in countering his particular threat—I wonder why this individual has not had more interest shown in him and his organisation before now.
	Without making any judgment on the rights or wrongs of the Iraq war, I am interested to hear those criticisms that spring up, saying that the war has made us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks since we engaged in it. Let me point out that those organisations, Al-Islam and Al-Sunna, brought us the January 2003 ricin attack—please note, before we went to war in Iraq. That organisation, I suggest, leaves al-Qaeda as we believe it to exist in the shadows. It is a long way in advance of some of the amateurish operations that we have seen from that group. That organisation tried to use weapons of mass destruction, and I use the phrase advisedly, on the mainland of this country as long as three years ago. If the newspapers are to be believed, it was active as recently as last weekend and its suspects are in custody. Whether they will be charged, released or released on control orders I have no idea. While I am delighted that the Government are getting a move on from this particular point, why has it taken so long to address those two, three or four groups, whatever they might call themselves?
	I challenge the Government to go a step further. Many of us have ignored the problem of terrorism—writing it off, thinking it would never happen in this country and that the study of it was too difficult. Well, it has happened. We have had the events of 7 July and 21 July. Possibly, something was planned for last weekend. Certainly, the arrests that followed suggest that we are still very much in jeopardy. Given that a debate on emergency planning is coming up later next week, I ask the Minister why all we see from the Government is lists of names and suggested legislation? Why do we not see concrete methods for the prevention and suppression of terrorism?
	The Minister talked eloquently about those organisations on this list of names adding to the hostile environment. There are a million things that we could do to make terrorism that much more difficult to demonstrate inside this country, but I come back to the point made by the hon. Member for Nottingham, South: we need to raise our awareness of it in the House and to ensure that our public understand what the threat is. With the greatest respect to my hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve), we must not think that these are a series of bizarre websites with bizarre names that we do not understand. We need to understand them.
	We the public—not just here in Parliament, but on the street—need to understand what the threat is. We must not just proscribe those organisations, but have a campaign for public information and public training that makes people understand what the threat is and know what to do about it. We have done this a million times before. For instance, I could ask the Government what their approach is on flooding. They are taking it extremely seriously, telling us what the danger is and how to cope with it.
	I shall finish on this point, if I may. This is not just a question of proscribing organisations, although that will help, and laying down laws, which might help, although I have yet to see a suicide bomber who would have been deterred by a law. We must have concrete measures, we must ensure that our people understand the dangers and know how to deal with them. We will be attacked again. We must ensure next time that we first make things more difficult for our enemies and that casualties are minimised.

Hazel Blears: I am grateful to hon. Members for the tone and way in which they have responded to the presentation of the order. Some serious and significant issues have been raised, and I shall endeavour to deal with them as far as I can. If any further detailed information is required, particularly by the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), I shall try to ensure that we provide it.
	Several Members asked whether we could have had a debate on a single organisation, or perhaps separate votes on single organisations. As I understand it, the procedure we have adopted today is that set out in the Terrorism Act 2000. This procedure is the normal way in which such things are brought forward, but I am conscious of the fact that the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) in particular raised the issue of an organisation over which there is controversy rather than a degree of consensus around the House in relation to the order. I undertake to look further into it. I cannot say that we will necessarily do as we have been asked, but I am conscious of the strength of the argument. No Member would welcome the prospect of 15 separate votes on such an order—that clearly would not be sensible—but I am conscious of Members' feelings.
	The hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson)—not that the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington is not my hon. Friend; I have two hon. Friends sat behind me—asked whether these organisations are simply fundamentalist, what is the depth of the activity they are engaged in, how we can get more information and what is the role of Parliament in scrutinising such orders. Again, I understand the point, because all Members of Parliament feel a strong duty in wanting to be able to take a view on behalf of their constituents and in terms of their role generally.
	Inevitably, I am constrained by the fact that these are matters of huge sensitivity involving desperately sensitive intelligence information, which, if in the public domain, could reduce our ability to withstand the threat of terrorism that faces us. I say to both my hon. Friends that for the Home Secretary to come forward with an order of this nature, he has to be satisfied that these people are not just expressing fundamentalist views, but are concerned in terrorism. We have a definition of terrorism, which is about violence, and he is satisfied that all these organisations—in one way or another in terms of their links to organisations and the activities they are engaged in—are concerned in terrorism.
	So, this is not simply a matter of free speech or people expressing views. There is a hard definition in the 2000 Act that these groups have to be concerned in terrorism for them to meet the proscription criteria. I ask my hon. Friends to think about that. This is not an academic debate about what people are saying on which we can all take a view; it is a real situation, as the hon. Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) said. We face a serious threat and these people are concerned in terrorism. The hon. Member for Beaconsfield talked about the fact that people have been murdering other people. That is one of the reasons they are included.

Dominic Grieve: I perhaps did not touch on one matter in my speech, but I would be grateful for the Minister's response. We have been talking about websites, and I pointed out that many people, unless they try to access the websites of these organisations, will be ignorant of them. What becomes the status of such websites in British law once proscription has taken place and what powers do the Government have to try to remove those websites as a result of proscription?

James Plaskitt: It is entirely right and proper to have a debate on fraud in the system, which greatly concerns our constituents, but the hon. Gentleman has provided me with an opportunity to stress that my Department is just as concerned about constituents who are entitled to benefits but do not receive them. I am particularly concerned about pensioner take-up of council tax benefits and we are piloting a number of different schemes around the country in order to improve that take-up. Those pilots appear to be proving quite effective. It is just as important that our constituents who have a benefit entitlement should receive it: that is what the system is there for—to provide the help. It is right to think of both aspects together, as everyone in the benefit system and all recipients also expect us to do the best we can to remove fraud. The hon. Gentleman is quite right to raise that issue. We also publish the results of one-off exercises that report levels of fraud and error in other benefits that we administer. Again, those are published to National Statistics standards.
	All those exercises contribute to the overall figure of fraud loss in the benefit system. As I said, the NAO has complimented us on our measurement systems, but we are continually looking at ways to improve estimates and provide results more quickly: we work closely with the NAO to achieve that. For example, we are refining the way that we measure income support and jobseeker's allowance and will be able to produce a revised baseline, which reflects how we administer our benefits more closely, for the next public service agreement. We have a good record to date on reducing levels of fraud in IS and JSA. Since 1997, we have reduced levels of fraud in those two benefits by two thirds.
	Our initial public service agreement target for income support and jobseeker's allowance was to reduce levels of fraud and error by 33 per cent. by March 2004, from the initial baseline measured in 1997. Our achieved reduction of 37 per cent. means that we exceeded that target, and we have set ourselves an even more ambitious one: we now aim to reduce fraud and error by 50 per cent. from the initial baseline by March 2006. Our latest figures, published for the period up to September 2004, show that we have already reduced fraud and error by 41 per cent. Achieving the remaining 9 per cent. reduction remains challenging, but I am optimistic that we will do it.
	I shall now set out what we did on the ground to achieve that reduction, how we persuaded our customers and the general public that benefit fraud is a crime, and how we enabled our staff to prevent and detect it.
	In summary, we did that by adopting an end-to-end approach—by getting the benefit right at the outset and then keeping it right once it was in payment. We also put benefits right when there were signs of clear abuse or error. We supported local authorities in their fight against fraud and error, and reduced our vulnerability by pursuing a welfare-to-work agenda.
	We also used the measurement exercises outlined earlier to identify the areas that we needed to address first, and where we should deploy the majority of our resources. For example, with income support and jobseeker's allowance, the practice of "working and claiming"—that is, concealing paid employment while drawing benefit—accounts for a large proportion of fraud loss. By targeting our resources in this area, our estimate of fraud in working and claiming has been reduced by around 70 per cent. between 2000 and 2004.
	Getting the benefit right at the outset is of great importance—both to us, as administrators of large amounts of Government money, and to our customers, who need to know that they are being paid the correct amount. We made more rigorous the checking process in the Department on new claims, especially for income support, and we did the same in local authorities, which administer housing benefit. We introduced additional checks on claims that carry a higher degree of risk—a theme to which I shall return later—including making visits to our customers' homes to check their circumstances at first hand.
	Most importantly, we have ensured that the principles of programme protection are embedded in staff roles throughout Jobcentre Plus. For instance, in Jobcentre Plus, we now have over 2,500 financial assessors, who make sure that the customer is paid the correct amount of benefit, and 1,300 national insurance number allocation officers, who help prevent identity fraud. Those staff are in addition to our fraud investigation officers, and are also solely responsible for safeguarding benefit expenditure.
	In addition, of course, we are maintaining the numbers of front-line fraud investigators. We are building on our successes by creating a new, nationally organised service of 2,000 investigators, who will concentrate on criminal law investigations. Also, 1,000 front-line compliance officers will bear down on lower level fraud and non-compliance, making a strong link between detection and prevention. We are not reducing the levels of front-line staff, but refocusing to maintain the number of sanctions while gaining efficiencies in the process.
	We have also put more effort into keeping benefit right once it is in payment. We employ data matching, using our information and that of other Departments, to detect claims that have become incorrect. We have worked closely with Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs in this matter. Since 2000–01, the amounts of overpayments identified through data matching with HMRC have nearly doubled, to just under £40 million per year.
	By means of data matching we identify nearly 130,000 incorrect claims within the Department a year, and local authorities identify an additional 65,000. We are also using increasingly sophisticated technology and analytical techniques to risk-profile the types of cases that are more likely to become incorrect, and we correct them when they do. We also want to make use of additional data sources, and I shall outline our plans in that respect in a moment.
	We invested in professional training for our investigators, developing an intelligence-led approach to investigations, and introduced new powers to combat fraud in the Social Security Fraud Act 2001. Our investigators can now access suspected fraudsters' bank accounts and other financial institutions, and there were nearly 40,000 requests for such information last year. We updated our policy on sanctions, including the commencement of cautions and administrative penalties. That ensures that we maximise the deterrence effect as there are a variety of penalties that we can impose for even small offences. In 2004–05, we penalised nearly 43,000 people for benefit fraud—a fourfold increase from 1997. We also now use the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 to confiscate the assets of major benefit fraudsters, and we recovered more than £2 million in 2004–05.
	We support local authorities in their fight against fraud and are pleased with their success to date. Reducing fraud and error remains a considerable challenge in housing benefit, and we will continue to work with them to reduce it further. We have also introduced the national anti-benefit fraud advertising campaign to deter people from committing benefit fraud, and increased the capacity of the national benefit fraud hotline to receive information from the public about benefit fraudsters. The hotline has proved to be very cost effective. For every £1 spent on running it, we identify more than £9 of defrauded benefit. We welcome the support from the public—our constituents—and want that to continue. We are working to increase the capacity of the hotline still further as sometimes callers are unable to get through. That is not acceptable, and we are taking steps to address that. Soon the hotline will be part of our national contact centre network, which will increase the number of people able to take fraud referrals from the public.

Paul Goodman: Can the Minister remind the House whether the number of calls answered by the hotline last year rose or fell?

James Plaskitt: As I have just said, we estimate that the loss to the benefit system as a result specifically of identity fraud is between £20 million and £50 million out of a total fraud loss of £900 million. I shall leave the hon. Gentleman to push the keys on his calculator and work out the percentage for himself.
	We need to work more efficiently across the whole Department to use the technology available to us to stop fraud earlier, before it enters the benefit system, or as soon as possible afterwards. We are working to ensure that we receive information from other Departments more quickly.
	As I said earlier, we will increase our ability to data match. We are currently able to data match our own information, as well as data from other Departments, which predominantly enables us to detect fraudsters who are working and claiming. However, a large number of fraudsters claim they live alone, when they actually live with a partner, and that type of fraud is difficult to detect using Government sources, so I can announce today that, early next year, we will be piloting a scheme whereby we match our data with that held by credit reference agencies, to help us detect people who are living with a partner but have not declared that to us. We estimate that such information will enable us to identify many thousands of cases of fraud of that type up to 18 months earlier than at present, in keeping with our strategy to detect fraud and error and correct it as soon as it occurs. Once that activity becomes fully operational we estimate that we could save up another £40 million a year. We will also explore the use of private sector data, where appropriate, to help us bear down on other frauds that are harder to detect.
	We will also increase our use of risk profiling, to identify the types of people whose claims are more likely to be fraudulent, and to check more frequently that their claims are correct. We believe that the proposed identity card will be a useful tool in all the work of our Department. We shall use it across all our businesses to combat identity and other frauds, and improve the service we give to our customers by verifying their identity more speedily.
	Our reorganised fraud investigation service, together with a new customer compliance approach, will enable us to detect, penalise and deter fraudsters more effectively than before. It will tackle serious, high-level frauds, as well as enforcing customer responsibilities to report changes in their circumstances on time.
	We will continue to work in partnership with other Departments and local authorities to combat deliberate abuse of the benefit system. We will continue to reinforce the culture of rights and responsibilities in our messages to customers and the public, through the anti-benefit fraud campaign and the national benefit fraud hotline. The new targeting fraud campaign, launched on 3 October, focuses on our ability to detect fraudsters without their knowledge through the use of data matching. Our research shows that the campaign has been successful with the public; 72 per cent. of the public and 67 per cent. of our customers have got the message, "You will be caught", from those television adverts.
	We have achieved much on benefit fraud. We know, however, that the monetary value of mistakes made by our staff and customers remains too high, and we acknowledge the comments of the Public Accounts Committee in that regard. We will do more to ensure that our staff administer benefits correctly and to help our customers keep their claims correct. To achieve that, we are developing plans to maximise the use of new information technology, to make the benefit system easier to administer and to introduce more timely communications with customers. We are confident that those measures will help us to reduce the overall loss to the benefit system still further.
	In conclusion, as I said in opening the debate, we know that we have achieved a real, measurable reduction in fraud over the past eight years, but we are not complacent. We can do much more to bring fraud down even further. I have described the extent of our achievement to date and presented our strategy for the future. I believe that that approach will enable the Government to make further progress on reducing fraud and error. It will also help to embed the balanced culture of rights and responsibilities more deeply in the benefit system and among our customers.

Paul Goodman: The hon. Gentleman also reads the tabloids.
	Lizzy Bardsley was ordered to pay back some £7,000-worth of benefits after receiving almost £4,000-worth of media fees, but I will not labour the point.
	The House will unite in agreeing that, as the Minister rightly said at the beginning, every pound erroneously paid out by the Department because of fraud or error is a pound that could have gone to a vulnerable claimant in real need and that benefit fraud must be rooted out. The Department argues that it is rooting out benefit fraud and error. I shall argue that proper scrutiny of the figures reveals that the Government are doing less well than they claim, that they could do much better and that they would do much better if they applied two sensible principles for reform.
	One person who agrees with me that the Department could do much better is apparently no less a person than the Prime Minister himself. According to a Channel 4 news report broadcast earlier this week, he has written to the Secretary of State to ask for action on incapacity benefits, presumably—I can think of no other reason—on the basis that a significant percentage of the payments are being claimed fraudulently and paid erroneously.

Paul Goodman: The Minister shakes his head. If he wants to intervene, I am very happy to let him do so.
	The Prime Minister suggested in his letter—I quote from the Channel 4 report—that
	"benefits should be time limited. People should not claim it after two years and would move on to other benefits or no benefits . . . many could be £30 to £40 a week worse off".
	Labour Members may have seen those reports. The Secretary of State presumably agrees with the Prime Minister. He has recently referred to the current situation as "crackers", so he presumably thinks that the Prime Minister is right. I wonder therefore whether he has confidence in the latest estimate by his Department, which was issued earlier today in a document that I shall come to later, that there is £10 million-worth of fraud in incapacity benefit. So I have a question for the Minister, and he is welcome to intervene on me in response: has the Department ruled out time-limiting incapacity benefits—a rumour that some of us heard before the general election—and has it ruled out a two-year cut-off date? There is no answer from the Minister. Those present must make of that what they can, but the Department certainly has not ruled it out.
	The Department has estimated up until today—we will come to today's figures in a moment—that of the £109 billion spent on benefits and employment programmes last year, £3 billion may have been lost because of fraud and error. That is less than 3 per cent. of the total. However, we must apply to all these figures what I will call the Rooker principle. In 2001, Mr. Rooker, as he then was—he certainly is not now—said that in relation to fraud and error
	"the £2 billion is what we know about. Another £2 billion may be regarded with a high level of suspicion and there is a weak suspicion—sometimes, no more than a hunch—about another £3 billion".—[Official Report, Westminster Hall, 8 February 2001; Vol. 362, c. 303WH.]
	In other words, Lord Rooker, as he is now, believed four years ago that benefit fraud and error could be more than three times as high as the official figure. If we apply the Rooker principle today, the total amount lost last year in fraud and error could have been £9 billion rather than £3 billion.
	Let us assume for the moment that the Rooker principle does not apply and let us return to the official figures. Yes, on one hand, according to the latest Public Accounts Committee report, to which the Minister referred, and according to the National Audit Office, the fraud element has indeed fallen from £2 billion to £1.5 billion. On the other hand, however, the error element has risen from £1 billion to £1.5 billion.
	The Minister invited me a few moments ago to do a calculation and my hon. Friends will have been able to do it too. We and the whole House do not need arithmetical genius to grasp the point that there has been no net fall in fraud and error since 2001, and the losses to the taxpayer are, to borrow a word from the Public Accounts Committee's latest report, "astronomical".
	In the document issued today by the Department, lo and behold, we have a new figure. The Department claims that its latest best estimate of fraud is around £0.9 billion, so how did it get from £2 billion to £0.9 billion—a quite staggering reduction? Well, we find that £400 million is
	"due to a real reduction"—
	I shall linger for a moment over the word "real"—
	"in fraud in IS, JSA and Pension Credit"
	and that the remaining £700 million, which is roughly two thirds of the total new reduction, is according to the Department due to
	"a combination of a reduction in levels of fraud in the other benefits".
	Let us look at these other benefits more closely. I draw the Minister's attention first to table 1 in the appendix to today's document, which I shall also wave in the direction of the Liberal Democrat spokesman. According to this table, disability living allowance fraud has fallen from £500 million last year to only £40 million this year—a dramatic drop. That gives the Minister some £400 million of his £700 million saving. However, I now draw the Minister's attention—he may not think that we read these documents, but we certainly do—to footnote 2 at the bottom of table 1. It says that
	"the 2003/04 and 2004/05 contributions from DLA are not comparable".
	Why is that? It is because, as the footnote also says,
	"Much of the 2003/04 DLA fraud estimate . . . would no longer be classed as fraud according to the 2004/05 methodology".
	The Minister and the Department are quite entitled to change the methodology, and the Minister referred to that point in his speech, but how is it possible to claim a £460 million saving while conceding that the figures on which the savings are based are not comparable?

Paul Goodman: The Minister asks whether I agree in return, which means that he is conceding my point and conceding that the two are not comparable. In 1997, he fought the election on the manifesto pledge that Labour
	"will maintain action against benefit fraud".
	Labour was not saying that the then Government were doing nothing at all; it was saying that we were doing something and that it would build on it. He has just conceded that the basis on which the claim is made is simply not comparable.
	The Government have failed to reduce the total amount of taxpayers' money being wasted, so can the Minister explain why his written statement issued earlier today mentioned only a fraud figure and specifically failed to mention an error figure? Indeed, was that admission itself an error, or perhaps something worse?
	Furthermore, figures issued by the Department up until today have been rounded to the nearest £500 million, as the Minister said, so they have scarcely been a measure of exactitude. The figure is important, because an error margin of such a size would be more than enough to cancel out the 38 per cent. fraud reduction in income support and jobseeker's allowance reported by the Public Accounts Committee. The Committee's report said:
	"the Department needs estimates that are more accurate than the nearest £500 million."
	I make it clear that we welcome the new rounding to the nearest £100 million, although being £100 million out scarcely represents an accurate calculation either, so the Department will want to work on that. The Secretary of State is in the Chamber. If he sold his memoirs, as he might do, for £100 million and was overpaid so that he got £200 million, or underpaid so that he got nothing at all, he would certainly want to know about it.
	On overpayments, which according to official figures amounted to more than £1 billion in March last year, the Committee noted:
	"There is no satisfactory audit trail"
	of the estimated £9 billion overpaid during the past three years. It also notes that of that £9 billion, only £550 million has been recovered. Furthermore, some of the estimates on which the figures are based are more than six years old, because the Department has rightly given priority to high-risk benefits, such as income support, jobseeker's allowance and housing benefit.
	The Minister said, in effect, that the Department has a good chance of meeting the target of reducing income support and JSA fraud and error by 50 per cent. from 1997–98 levels by March 2006. However, we must consider the target of reducing housing benefit fraud and error from the 2002–03 levels by 25 per cent. by March 2006. In the baseline period of 2002–03, the amount of benefit overpaid to working-age claimants in the housing benefit review sample—a sample must be used when examining housing benefit because getting to the bottom of it is complicated—was estimated at 6 per cent. of total benefit paid. Last year, the figure was estimated at 5.8 per cent., which represents a drop. The latest estimate from "Fraud and error in housing benefit" by National Statistics is 6.66 per cent. below the baseline level. I shall not let my imagination linger over the figure 6,6,6. Is the Minister confident that the 2006 housing benefit target will be hit, because there is speculation that the Department might not do so?
	The Department is right to prioritise income support, JSA, housing benefit and now pension credit in its examination of fraud and error. I certainly concede that examining fraud and error more widely would result in cost to the taxpayer, so a fine balance must be struck. However, it cannot be right to assume that some benefits, such as the incapacity benefits that Mr. Crowson was claiming, should remain measured inexactly. That brings me to the principles for reform.
	First, the tax and benefits system needs to be made more simple. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who, since 1997, has been in effect the real Work and Pensions Secretary, has created a cat's cradle. The system is not simple; it is complex and getting more complex. That is not simply the view of the official Opposition or the Liberal Democrats. Thomas Boyd-Carpenter, the recently retired chairman of the Social Security Advisory Committee, wrote in his final report, which was something of a cri de coeur:
	"The size, complexity and dispersion of the benefits system"—
	I assume that he meant the dispersion off to the Treasury—
	"and the blurring of the boundaries"
	with tax credits
	"has led to a pervading . . . loss of cohesion".
	He said bluntly that the system was now "alien" to the people whom rely on it. Hon. Members in the Chamber know that what Sir Thomas said as chair of his committee in Whitehall was but an echo of what we hear each week in our surgeries and during our daily phone calls from constituents.
	Secondly, the Department should make more use of the private sector. Its written statement issued today refers to
	"increasing the use of private sector data",
	so it is on to that. That is right, but the Public Accounts Committee notes baldly that the Department
	"could not obtain data on fraud and error for the private sector."
	That does not sound too hopeful. The Committee rightly recommends that the Department, together with the National Audit Office, should find out what could be done to compare its present performance with that of major private sector financial institutions.
	The Department is, as we all know, being asked to shed some 30,000 jobs, which is about a quarter of its work force, at a time when it is trying to tackle the persistent causes of fraud and error. I asked the Minister about the hotline, because I have heard some of the Department's critics argue that the fall in the number of calls answered by the hotline, from just over 211,000 in 2003–04 to 199,000 last year—only 0.24 per cent. of these calls lead to a court conviction—may be related not only to advertising but to ongoing changes.
	The Department argues that job reductions will not affect efficiency and delivery, and far be it from us to argue. However, the Department must ensure that any reductions affect back rooms and not the front line. In particular, it should, as the PAC said, assess the savings that can be derived from deploying additional staffing on effective fraud prevention and detection activities such as data matching and intelligence analysis.
	We proposed at the election that Jobcentre Plus staff should be transferred to the private and voluntary sectors with no compulsory redundancies and that the role of those sectors should be expanded. We believe that that is a model for the future.
	We owe it to the taxpayer and to the vulnerable, and to the constituents who we see in our surgeries and to whom we speak each day, to deliver a system that is as free from fraud as possible. I acknowledge that some good work has been done, but much remains to be done. As we have seen today, given the dexterity with which the Government slipped out two figures which are inconsistent with each other, we can have no confidence that the Department is free from error. I saw today, before I came into the Chamber, that Harold Pinter, one of our greatest playwrights, has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. If the Department is to rely on the statistical sleight of hand that is illustrated on page 33, the Minister may risk being awarded the Nobel Prize for fiction.

Danny Alexander: I welcome—as did the shadow Conservative spokesman, the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman)—the progress that has undoubtedly been made and which has been outlined by the Minister this afternoon. Progress has been made in reducing fraud in income support and jobseeker's allowance. More broadly, the figures published today suggest that fraud has been reduced to a total of £0.9 billion. I shall not embark on a detailed analysis of the figures because the hon. Member for Wycombe has done that, but I have one relatively straightforward question.
	In the Public Accounts Committee report, the total figure for fraud and error was £3 billion. It is not clear from the figures published today whether the total for fraud and error remains at £3 billion. In other words, should we draw the conclusion from today's report that while the amount of fraud has been reduced to £0.9 billion, the amount of error has increased to £2.1 billion? What is the total figure for fraud and error based on today's new calculations? Should we assume that because a more detailed methodology for measuring fraud has been developed, the amount of error is to fill the gap in the £3 billion figure that has been quoted not only for the past year, but for previous years?
	I agree with the Minister that despite the evidence of progress, fraud is still at too high a level. Tuesday's PAC report gave ample evidence and analysis of the reasons for that. It said that the Department is still not performing to the standards that might reasonably be expected. There is a long way to go on both fraud and error—losses due to error remain too high.Today's figures suggest that benefit fraud has been reduced roughly to the level of fraud against the European Union budget, which may be a cause for celebration for Conservative Members but suggests that there is still quite a long way to go. Overall, the fact that the Department has had its accounts qualified by the National Audit Office for each of the past 15 years, including every year that this Government have been in power, suggests that too little has been done on this issue for too long, and too slowly.
	The Government's own pronouncements confirm that there is slow progress. In 2000, the Secretary of State said:
	"We are taking a zero tolerance approach to fraud."
	A press release was headlined, "We are winning the fight against fraud." That was on 28 January 2000, five years ago. Reading the NAO report, it is clear that despite the diplomatic language, the tone is one of real frustration. I would be grateful if the Minister could let us know what discussions he has had with the NAO about the levels of fraud and error that would have to be reached before the Department's accounts were given a clear bill of health by that organisation.
	The Conservatives should not be too critical of the situation, as their record in Government was hardly one to be proud of. They only began detailed measuring of the level of fraud in 1995, 15 years after they first came to office. The dramatic shift from unemployment benefit to invalidity benefit—now incapacity benefit—took place under a Conservative Government, so their record is none too good. Equally, it is a mistake to view benefit fraud in isolation. The tax credit system introduced by the present Government is part of the welfare system, and we know from various reports that in 2003–04 £2.2 billion-worth of tax credits were overpaid. The National Audit Office says that fraud and error in the tax credit system amount to 5 to 11 per cent. of the total bill for tax credits or up to £1.5 billion. It has qualified the accounts for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, so the disease seems to be spreading instead of being eradicated.

Richard Benyon: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, and the Minister might like to reflect on the fact that we proposed transferring Jobcentre Plus to the private sector at no loss of jobs. That is an important point.
	It is rather tired to talk about the last Conservative Government, as they were in power eight years ago, but, for the record, it is worth paying tribute to the efforts made by that Government and by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley), who worked himself to a frazzle trying to sort out the issue of benefit fraud and introduced reforms and technologies that, at the time, were revolutionary, such as the smart card.
	I am sure that the definition of benefit fraud is written in the Minister's marrow. It is, of course,
	"the deliberate misrepresentation of circumstances or a failure to notify changes in circumstances with the intention of obtaining benefit to which the customer is not entitled".
	We are all aware of the Department's hard-hitting campaign and the stereotypical fraudster depicted in those advertisements. No one in the House would criticise that approach, and it is important to bear down on benefit fraudsters of the kind that the campaign portrays. No one in the House would oppose many of the reforms and the campaigns that the Government intend to introduce to crack down on benefit fraud, perhaps with the exception of what the Minister said about ID cards. I and many of my colleagues, and the Liberal Democrats, feel that the enormous amounts of money involved in the flawed IT and all sorts of other problems would be much better spent in providing, for example, more police to feel the collars of benefit fraudsters in another way.
	I want to speak to a particular point concerning disability living allowance, which was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman). The Government's own figures estimate that in the last financial year £730 million was overpaid in DLA, which amounts to 9.1 per cent. of expenditure. The equivalent estimate of underpayment is £200 million, representing 2.5 per cent. of expenditure.
	I was working on those figures as I prepared for this afternoon's debate—multi-tasking, which my wife claims I cannot do, but I was obviously in touch with my feminine side. While working through my correspondence, I read a moving and brave letter written to me by a constituent. She admits to suffering from the horrendous condition of schizophrenia, but says she is
	"in the fortunate position of getting lower rate DLA and tax credits which means I can work part-time . . . I get a lot out of doing part-time work, it is therapeutic and"—
	this is an important point—
	"it is better for society as a whole that I am working and not . . . dependent on benefit."
	My constituent goes on to say that her community psychiatric nurse knows many people
	"who are less disabled than me who get middle or higher rate DLA."
	My constituent knows many people
	"who would greatly benefit from being able to work part-time who are as disabled as me but do not get any DLA at all."
	It is the system, she claims, that is at fault. She makes the same point as the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey about the 55-page form:
	"The current system of applying for DLA depends on your ability to describe your illness and people who are more articulate seem to have a better chance of getting it. It also seems to depend on who reviews your"
	case. Her key point is:
	"I know there are people who abuse the system but there are also genuine people who are not getting the help they are entitled to."
	Part of the Government's strategy must be to make it easy for people not to commit fraud as well as bearing down hard on those who are committing fraud. They can do that by making the system easy to understand, by improving the training and morale of those within the organisations that monitor benefits, and by creating a much more level playing field for applicants, giving professional advice and assistance to organisations such as citizens advice bureaux, which do such a fantastic job in constituencies such as mine in guiding people through the morass of paperwork.
	Members are constantly told by constituents that those who break the rules are rewarded, and that those who wish to obey them must follow a tortuous path of bureaucracy and, if anything, are penalised for doing what is right. I urge the Government to bear those points in mind as they work through this important matter.

Philip Dunne: I am pleased that we have an opportunity to discuss these issues today, not least as part of my learning curve as a new member of the Work and Pensions Committee. It is invaluable to have some good research time to help to prepare for such debates, and the whole subject of benefit fraud and error is very topical given the publication of the Public Accounts Committee's report earlier this week. To ensure public confidence in our benefits system, it is utterly vital that we as a nation are seen to cut down on fraudsters.
	For people on benefits, there is nothing worse—all MPs have experience of these cases—than seeing people claiming benefits to which they are not entitled. It cuts to the core of a legal system that chases up those who seek to defraud, and we must bear down hard on it. We must also ensure that the public bodies that administer benefits do so efficiently and do not cause problems that aggravate the difficulties that those who rightly claim benefit and who may have been overpaid suffer when the authorities challenge them.
	The Minister laid great store by his claims that improvements have been made in fraud detection over the past few years, and I acknowledge, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman) did, the improvements made in reducing fraud in relation to income support and jobseeker's allowance. As other Members have said, however, there is no getting away from the Public Accounts Committee's conclusions that over the past three years the overall level of fraud and error in the benefits system remains pound for pound where it has been. I would be interested to hear anything from the Minister when he responds that gives us some comfort that things are moving in the right direction across the piece. We have heard snippets here and there.
	I am particularly concerned about the lack of success in achieving the Government's targets for housing benefit. If there are more measures on that in today's report, I should be pleased to read about them.
	The Work and Pensions Committee is due to start a review on incapacity benefit and pathways to work, one element of which is an attempt to get to the bottom of what is happening on fraud. Unfortunately, the statistics in all the reports that I have seen so far are estimated, and incapacity benefit has not had as thorough a job done on it as other benefits. In a way, that is right, because we hope that few who claim incapacity benefit do so fraudulently, but human nature being as it is, I fear that there may be some hidden fraud in that area, too.
	Let me list some of the successes achieved by local authorities. A number of written statements on this matter have been published this week, and I am pleased to say that an authority in my constituency, Bridgnorth district council, is judged to have achieved a qualified success. According to the comprehensive performance assessment of April 2004, the council's benefit service was giving a "fair towards good" performance. A more recent assessment suggested that the council had met the standard in respect of 84 of the 89 components of counter-fraud. It was described as having
	"a strong anti-fraud culture and a number of strengths in this area."
	Its overall performance was assessed as very impressive compared with that of other similar-sized authorities. It has approximately £8.4 million of benefits to distribute, so it is at the small end of councils in the country, but it has imposed a strong culture of cracking down on fraud.
	Let me illustrate some of the shifts that have taken place since control of the council moved to a Conservative and Independent administration. There is an assessment of the number of cautions issued by the council. Between 2002–03 and 2004–05, the number was halved from 33 to 16. The number of administrative penalties imposed during the same period tripled from eight to 24. The number of prosecutions rose from six in 2002–03 to 16 in 2003–04, and fell back to eight in 2004–05. That is attributed to the fact that rather than using cautions as its primary means of combating fraud, the council has chosen to impose penalties and to be seen by the community to take cases to court.
	I labour the point for a reason. I believe that if we are to restore confidence in our fraud-combating system, such issues must be brought into the public domain. In my area at least, successful prosecutions achieve publicity all too infrequently. Let me make a plea to the Minister. Local authorities that are constantly invited to do more on behalf of the Government are rarely given the facilities that would enable them to do the extra work. Publicity for cases or more resources for anti-fraud measures would be very welcome. I speak not just for Bridgnorth district council but for South Shropshire district council, which is also in my area.
	Let me now say something about errors. It is up to local authorities and Government agencies to ensure that enough resources are given to assessment of benefits across the board. As other Conservative Members have pointed out, it is hard to reconcile the proposed Gershon job cuts with greater bearing down on fraud and an accurate assessment of benefits. I shall give another personal example, if I may. Ludlow, a town in my constituency, has a Jobcentre Plus centre that will close next year. Half the current staff will lose their jobs, and half will be relocated to some place yet to be determined, probably the tourist information centre. I find it hard to understand how a sub-optimal team who may or may not be able to provide full nine-to-five cover will be able to do their job properly. I met the regional director, who assured me that the job could be handled perfectly well by a town 15 miles away, but I do not see how that efficiency saving assists in the proper calculation of benefit and bearing down on fraud—major issues across the country, as hon. Members have argued.
	To achieve a balance, however, I want to pay tribute, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Mr. Benyon), to the work done by citizens advice bureaux in assisting people who get into difficulties with the assessment of their benefits. There is no question that, where errors arise, it causes immense frustration among some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Such people often have to rely on citizens advice bureaux for whatever help they can get. I have received representations from the citizens advice bureau in Bridgnorth, which tried to help elderly pensioners on modest incomes who were struggling with the various assessments made of them and greatly feared having to repay overpayments. It is important to improve standards of benefit assessment in order to allay such anxieties.
	Inevitably, with large organisations and complicated benefits, these problems will arise. Unfortunately, we see them across too many areas of government these days. The complexity of the systems that have been put in place gives rise to more and more problems for ordinary people. I urge the Minister to argue with his colleagues in favour of increasing simplicity in our benefits system.

James Plaskitt: With the leave of the House, I should like to respond to the points raised in the course of the debate. I appreciate the time that hon. Members have taken to debate combating benefit fraud. If I do not manage to cover all their observations in my winding-up speech, I shall want to reflect on them further.
	We all appreciate the seriousness of benefit fraud. It is not the victimless crime that fraudsters like to think it is. It is theft from the taxpayer and theft from the most vulnerable people who would benefit more substantially from the total resources allocated if others did not choose to exploit the system for their own gain.
	The hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman), who led for the Opposition, challenged me over the forthcoming reform of incapacity benefit. I suggest that he waits a little longer, because the consultation process is not far off now. When the consultation process commences shortly, he will receive useful advice on the questions that he tempted me to answer now.
	The hon. Gentleman also asked whether we had had any success in meeting targets on fraud and error in respect of housing benefit. Thus far, progress has been pretty encouraging, but I want to be perfectly candid in saying that these are tough targets. They are targets that we, as well as the 408 different local authorities that administer housing benefit, have to work on. Control over managing that benefit is more dispersed than for others, which makes the target serious, challenging and tough, as it should be. I am optimistic that progress will be made. With particular respect to error over housing benefit, I can tell the hon. Gentleman that the level has fallen by 9 per cent. over the last 18 months.
	The hon. Member for Wycombe also accused the Government of some sleight of hand over the statistics in the document published today. I am forced to repeat that we could not have had a debate like this at all during the first 15 years of the last Conservative Government, because no serious attempt had been made to measure fraud and error in the system. The Conservative Government came to that issue late in the day and I hope that the hon. Gentleman would acknowledge that our determined efforts to measure it have allowed us to have a serious discussion about the matter.
	Not only did the previous Conservative Government come very late to the concept of measuring fraud and error, their record on prosecutions does not stand much examination either. In the final year of that Administration, 12,000 people were prosecuted, whereas last year, under this Government, 42,000 people were subject to sanctions, administrative action or prosecution for fraud in the benefit system. That is nearly a fourfold increase. The hon. Member for Wycombe might also want to reflect on the fact that, in 1997, one claim in 10 for income support and jobseeker's allowance was wrong. The figure now is one claim in 25. Although in this debate I have freely accepted that there are still plenty of problems in the system, that many challenges remain and that we are still not content with the level of fraud, the hon. Gentleman should acknowledge that the position now is considerably better than what we inherited in 1997.

James Plaskitt: The hon. Gentleman made a lot of points and I am still working through them, so I hope that he will bear with me.
	The hon. Gentleman also asked me to comment on local authorities and the administration of housing benefit, and he was not the only one to raise that issue. He should know that my Department has helped local authorities to achieve better administration of housing benefit. We have provided financial assistance to local authorities for that purpose, and the vast majority have taken it up. I have visited several local authorities in various parts of the country to see how they have deployed those resources, and the best are very good at administering housing benefit and are making significant gains in performance. However, performance still does not come up to standard in too many local authorities, and we have an inspectorate to work with them. The Department also remains happy to work with them to improve their performance. All local authorities should reach the standard of the best.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about benefit underpayment, as did other hon. Members. He is right to say that it should be assessed against the issue of fraud and, as I said, the Department has several programmes to try to ensure that benefit is taken up. He asked about our progress on debt recovery and I can tell him that last year we recovered nearly £200 million of debt. I think the figure is actually £189 million, but he can check it in the recorded information.
	The hon. Gentleman also asked about welfare reform and hoped that it was driven not only by a desire to crack down on fraud but by wider objectives. I can ensure him that it is driven by a much wider perspective. He will recall that we published the principles of welfare reform recently and I hope that he has had time to study them. They drive the Government's welfare reform programme and will be elaborated further when we publish the Green Paper—I am sure that the hon. Gentleman eagerly anticipates it.
	I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) for welcoming the Government's long-term strategy to tackle fraud and error. He asked whether there was a conflict between achieving staff reductions in line with the Gershon review and combating fraud. I hope to reassure him that those two objectives are not in conflict. We will not reduce the 2,000 fraud inspectors. Indeed, we will transfer 1,000 additional staff from the functions that they currently perform into the front line to work on customer compliance to help to ensure that the benefit paid is right at the outset. In fact, I can tell my hon. Friend that when I come to the House with legislation to reform housing benefit, I shall try to resolve another issue in the system that currently prevents local government officials working on housing benefit from investigating possible fraud in nationally delivered benefits. We want to take powers to correct that, which could mean that another 2,000 or so officials in the system will be able to work across a wider range of fraud than those associated only with housing benefit.
	My hon. Friend was right to say that to progress staff reductions requires dialogue between Department managers and staff. That dialogue is in place and it needs to continue. There is no doubt that the Gershon challenges are tough and it is extremely important that we proceed through dialogue, and we intend to do so.
	Let me deal with the remaining speeches from Opposition Members. I was charmed by the belief of the hon. Member for Newbury (Mr. Benyon) that the Conservative party's proposed privatisation of Jobcentre Plus would not have resulted in job losses. Happily, we shall not find out because that is not going to happen, but it is a quaint belief.
	The hon. Gentleman rightly moved on to disability living allowance. I am pleased that he has been examining overpayment and underpayment. We made a thorough reassessment of DLA this year to establish the exact position. That is one of the factors that has led to changes in the numbers. After careful re-examination of DLA payments, we found that, although some were inappropriate, they were not fraudulent, yet they had previously been classed as fraudulent payments. It is important to clarify that as it helps us to understand issues in the administration of DLA.
	The hon. Gentleman concluded by suggesting that the Government should go for greater simplification in the benefit system. We agree. That is why the benefit simplification programme is under way with more to come, which I am sure he is eagerly awaiting.
	The hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr. Dunne) asked whether things were improving. They are. The figures that I announced and clarified for the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey show that things are improving. We can report that the situation is better than the £3 billion-plus total that the hon. Member for Ludlow has already seen and which was mentioned in the Public Accounts Committee report.
	I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman is a member of the Select Committee and I look forward to seeing the Committee's deliberations on incapacity benefit. I am pleased also that he praised the efforts of his local authorities in helping us bear down on benefit fraud. He was right to do so, and I am happy to add my praise for any local authority, whatever its political complexion, which helps us to bear down on benefit fraud. A significant number are and we are grateful for their efforts. I can reassure him that there will be no reduction in the number of staff tackling benefit fraud.
	The hon. Gentleman rightly praised the work of citizens advice bureaux and I am happy to add my praise to his. As well as the CAB, other voluntary organisations, such as welfare rights groups, work hard for no reward to help people deal with the benefit system. They do extremely valuable work.
	Eliminating a culture where defrauding others is seen as acceptable is part of the Government's respect agenda, but it is also vital in maintaining support for the welfare state and a caring and compassionate society where self-help and mutual help go hand in hand. Our aim is to reduce loss to the benefit system still further. The strategies we have in place and the further actions I have outlined during the debate will enable us to do just that.
	I close our debate by sending a clear message to those who seek to defraud the benefit system. They need to understand that we have more powers than ever to detect, prosecute and punish those committing benefit fraud. By using better technology and effective data matching, fraudsters are being investigated without their knowledge. They will be caught and they will be punished.

Peter Robinson: I am grateful to the House for the opportunity that this Adjournment debate provides me to raise the issue of a rapid transit system for Belfast. I am sure that the Minister is also glad that the debate is being held at quarter past 4, rather than 6 o'clock. I can see him working out his flight schedule in his mind already.
	This scheme is not a new proposal for Belfast and Northern Ireland but one that was established as an integral part of the Northern Ireland transportation strategy document, yet very little progress seems to have been made on it in the past three years. Belfast, like virtually every other United Kingdom city, faces growing transport problems. Over the next years and decades, those problems are set to increase significantly. Given the relentless growth in traffic, our roads will become increasingly congested, with implications for economic growth and social mobility.
	Of course, the motor car must be part of the solution, but we cannot allow it to be the sole one; public transport must play an increasingly important role in dealing with the anticipated problems. Unless we start to deal with those problems now, however, the cost to the economy will be significant. Solutions to transport problems are rarely short-term or cheap, but the cost of not tackling them in advance is even greater.
	When I was Minister at the Department for Regional Development in Northern Ireland, we undertook work on developing a rapid transit system for Belfast. I received much support from the Assembly's Regional Development Committee, and later the Assembly unanimously supported me when I introduced the Province's regional transport strategy, which incorporated the piloting of a rapid transit scheme for Belfast. Yet, since devolution was suspended in Northern Ireland, no discernable progress has been made in accomplishing that objective—an objective that, I repeat, was unanimously supported by Northern Ireland's political parties. One might have thought that the Government would be keen to encourage Northern Ireland's political parties when they are able to agree unanimously.
	I believe that a rapid transit system can be created in Belfast that will not need to carry the costs associated with light rail but can achieve the modal shift that is required if we are to avoid gridlock on some key traffic corridors in the Belfast area in the future. Historically, it has been difficult to persuade many people out of their cars and on to public transport, as the bus has not been an attractive alternative. Although I welcome the concept of "metro" in Belfast and although the provision of bus lanes and a more reliable service can play an important role in encouraging people to use public transport, for many people they will never be attractive enough to replace the car. Rapid transit has that potential.
	The EWAY corridor presents Belfast with a tremendous opportunity to introduce a rapid transit system that can meet the particular circumstances of the city. It offers many benefits, including a potential solution to increasing traffic problems in the corridor, consistency with Government policy, the integration of transport and land use planning, private investment in public transport, the opportunity to encourage people out of their cars and a pilot scheme at reasonable cost that could be expanded right across the city.
	In the past, the main objection to rapid transit in Belfast has been its potential cost, but a number of new developments offer a way through this difficulty. Rapid transit projects usually focus on some form of light rail or guided bus system that can, admittedly, be very expensive to create and maintain. Although such systems have been able to encourage people to make the shift from the private car—normal buses have been unable to achieve that—that result has been achieved only at significant financial cost.
	There are, or at least there were, those in finance and personnel in Northern Ireland who argue that the cost would be disproportionate. I always contended that they had not placed sufficient weight on the consequences, not least to our economy, of congestion and gridlock around Belfast. Yet they argued that, although rapid transit can be justified in cities with high population densities, it is more difficult to justify in cities with a relatively low density such as Belfast. However, I remember arguing that cities such as Helsinki, even with a relatively low population, have often shown that effective public transport is possible.
	The Assembly's endorsement of the rapid transit scheme swung the argument decisively in favour of proceeding with the scheme. Indeed, £100 million was, if not allocated, certainly earmarked for such a scheme to proceed. However, the return of direct rule Ministers left the doubting Thomases in finance and personnel in a strong position to apply the brakes—that they seem to have done. Today, with a relatively new incumbent in office, I appeal to the Government to look afresh at the potential that such a scheme could offer for Northern Ireland and particularly for Belfast.
	Changing technology and other alternatives present opportunities to revisit the issue of rapid transit. It has been demonstrated in other parts of the world that, with the correct infrastructure, it is not necessary to have very expensive transport vehicles with very high ongoing costs. I believe that such an approach could be taken in Belfast. For example, the Wright Group from Ballymena in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for North Antrim (Rev. Ian Paisley)—I believe that the Secretary of State took the opportunity to visit the firm recently—has produced a "street car" that could deliver the same results as light rail at a much lower cost. This is being sold across Europe and in Great Britain, but there has been no opportunity to make use of it in Northern Ireland.
	The natural place to have a rapid transit pilot in Belfast is along the eastern approach into the city, an area that has become known as the EWAY. Given that much of the EWAY corridor is already in place and in public ownership, with the old disused Comber railway line, this could be transformed at a relatively limited expense compared with the costs that would be associated with the compulsory purchase of a route. There would also be the advantage of vehicles such as the street cars being able to travel across the designated area previously used by the old Comber railway and then travel on normal streets—albeit in designated bus lanes—thus reducing the costs even further and allowing for greater flexibility.
	The development of the EWAY is, strictly speaking, Government policy. In 2002, the Northern Ireland Assembly unanimously endorsed the regional transport strategy, which included proposals for a rapid transit system. The strategy provided for a total cost of £100 million to commence a rapid transit network. On suspension, the then Secretary of State announced that his Ministers would operate within the policies set down during devolution. That is all that I am asking the Minister and the Government to do.
	The proposal is also consistent with PPS13 on transportation and land planning, which sets out its main objectives as promoting sustainable transport choices and accessibility for all, and reducing the need to travel, especially by private car. The EWAY satisfies all those objectives. Since devolution was suspended, the project seems to have been put on hold. It will require a long lead-in time. Years are being wasted without any action appearing to have been taken. With direct rule, the project has not been seriously taken forward but there is now an opportunity for the new Minister—if I may call him that—to take it up and carry it forward.
	During devolution, I took the opportunity, while in the Department, to examine various forms of rapid transit, ranging from light rail through guided bus to a more conventional bus with high-quality infrastructure and dedicated separate lanes. Brisbane in Australia, in particular, appeared to offer a high-quality service without the need for high expenditure. There are already many cities in the UK that operate rapid transit systems with varying levels of success. The beauty of the EWAY scheme is that it could meet our traffic needs in a way tailored to our own circumstances. Belfast has a tremendous opportunity through the EWAY to tailor a transport solution that will suit its own needs.
	Self-evidently, one of the most significant considerations concerning the proposal will be cost. Despite the involvement of the private sector, public investment will obviously be required. However, that could be limited through a number of factors. By using a form of bus-type transport, the need for huge investment would be reduced. Using the old Comber rail line as a significant element of the route would also limit the need for huge investment.
	There is also the potential to exploit the planning gain of the scheme by creating a zone at the terminus in which development would be encouraged, but phased, to help to finance the scheme. In planning terms, it is better to control the development that will unquestionably and inevitably take place given that, over the years, it will be attracted to be near to the scheme. The Government should make a virtue out of the necessity and ensure that piecemeal development does not take place at the early stage and that the growth around the EWAY is controlled and in order.
	The Government have an opportunity to plan land use and development carefully. Indeed, the promoters of the project will be able to identify development opportunities even along the route. To maximise the benefit from the project, I suggest that we try to make developers pay for a significant portion of the EWAY's cost. Such development payments on targeted development would not only reduce the cost to the public purse, but strengthen the viability of the project by enlarging the pool of patrons who would use the service. Moreover, it could also provide significant resources to interest the private sector in the project. That approach has already won considerable local support from Castlereagh borough council, which has put such a proposition to the Government.
	In those new circumstances, and with an innovative approach being taken, the EWAY could not only provide a solution to the traffic problems down the eastern corridor into Belfast, but prove to be a model for the future. Rather than waiting another 10 years until congestion forces the Government to act, or alternatively for the return of devolution, the opportunity should be taken to press ahead with the project now.
	The project in the east of the city is a pilot, but the plan worked up during devolution was for the whole city, with an east-west route and a north-south route. It was suggested that it was possible to grasp the public's imagination with such a project. I put it to the Minister that there are examples of places throughout the United Kingdom where people have not been prepared to get out of their cars to travel on buses, but have been prepared to do so to travel on trams, light rail and guided buses. There is, however, a need for ministerial commitment to drive the scheme forward. I hope that we shall see something of that commitment this afternoon.
	I suggest that the Minister considers the appointment of an EWAY project group that is tasked to take the project forward, subject at appropriate stages to ministerial approval. The group could comprise representatives from Translink, business the construction industry, financial services and transport-related academia. The extent of local political involvement may also be an issue, and such involvement may come from those elected to the Assembly or representatives from Belfast city council and Castlereagh borough council.
	The project group could be expected to provide recommendations on the detail of the scheme, including costings and proposals for raising the funds to offset the costs and options to finance any shortfall. The remit of the group would also include making recommendations on the operation of the EWAY.
	This exciting and challenging project is capable of firing the imagination of the public and making a positive contribution to improving transportation and life in Belfast, but it will not happen without political leadership. I hope that the Minister and the Government will take this opportunity to look again at its potential.

Shaun Woodward: I congratulate the hon. Member for Belfast, East (Mr. Robinson) on securing the debate. There may be significantly fewer Members than we would like in the Chamber, but the matter will receive appropriate attention in the broadsheets of Northern Ireland.
	I know that the hon. Gentleman has considerable interest and expertise in this subject. That is not least because, as he said himself, he was Minister for Regional Development during devolution in Northern Ireland. In that capacity, the hon. Gentleman brought forward the 10-year regional transportation strategy for Northern Ireland, on which I congratulate him. It was, as he said, agreed unanimously by the Northern Ireland Assembly in July 2002.
	We continue to welcome all-party agreement wherever we can find it. The hon. Gentleman said that it is Government policy, and he is right. It is still Government policy. The regional transportation strategy presented a range of initiatives. If implemented, those initiatives would make a significant contribution to achieving the longer-term vision for transport that is set out in the regional development strategy 2025. To remind the House, that goal is of a modern, sustainable and safe transportation system which benefits society, the economy and the environment, and which actively contributes to social inclusion and everyone's quality of life.
	The hon. Gentleman, as Minister for Regional Development, knew that it was an ambitious strategy. In looking back at the minutes of the regional transportation strategy meeting of June 2002, I see that he noted that the then First Minister had raised questions over the deliverability of the transportation strategy, but felt that it was
	"better to fall short of an ambitious target than to meet a comfortable target."
	The hon. Gentleman pointed out that there would be no great problem if the RTS were achieved in 11 years rather than 10.
	I comment on that because, when considering the urgency with which we are asked to address this issue, I remind the hon. Gentleman that at the time he recognised that it was an ambitious strategy, that getting there in the end would be better than not getting there at all, that it might be better to regard the priorities immediately ahead of him as ones that needed to be achieved, and that that was not, for one moment, to put the rapid transit project to one side.
	The regional transportation strategy is the basis on which all transportation initiatives are now taken forward. It provides a framework for the development of transport plans which contain detailed programmes of major schemes and transport initiatives. Transport plans link with development plans and provide the region with an integrated approach to transportation and planning. The regional transportation strategy, the hon. Gentleman will remember, identified a requirement for £3.5 billion of expenditure from 2002 to 2012 to address deficiencies in Northern Ireland's transportation infrastructure and to work towards realising a long-term vision for transport. The regional transportation strategy included an estimate of £100 million to start a rapid transit network for Belfast. That was to be taken forward in the context of the Belfast metropolitan transport plan, which was published last year. The hon. Gentleman suggested that little progress had been made, but I believe that the transport plan demonstrates considerable progress. However—and this is an extremely important point—the regional transportation strategy makes it clear that the level of available funding from public expenditure would have to be determined through normal budgetary processes. According to the minutes of the meeting in which he took part in a ministerial capacity in 2002, he pointed out that the funding was not complete and that it would be
	"impossible to predict what would be happening regarding funding in the future."
	Furthermore, commitments to proceed with major schemes cannot be given until, as he will recall, appropriate economic appraisals have been considered and any statutory procedures concluded. I will return to the issue of economic appraisals, which the hon. Gentleman takes seriously. It would be foolish to launch an economic appraisal in the certain knowledge that in the next two or three years there would not be money in the budget to fund the £100 million scheme.
	The hon. Gentleman will be aware that the Department for Regional Development published the Belfast metropolitan transport plan last year. It supports the draft Belfast metropolitan area plan published by the Department of the Environment's planning service. The proposals in the transport plan set out the way in which the regional transportation strategy will be implemented in Greater Belfast, and outlines transport schemes and projects until 2015, all of which would be subject to statutory processes and the normal budgetary processes. The Belfast metropolitan transport plan confirmed that rapid transit is a component of a series of proposals to improve public transport in the Belfast metropolitan area. As the plan states, there is a clear requirement to improve the quality of public transport services in the metropolitan area so that there is a modern, integrated and accessible public transport system that extends travel choice for all.
	The Government want public transport to be a viable alternative that replaces many journeys currently taken by car, particularly by commuters, and to provide a high standard of transport for people who do not own or have access to a car. The transport proposals in the plan aim to bring about a step change in the quality of public transport services involving the improvement of the commuter rail network, the creation of an extensive network of quality bus corridors, the provision of high-quality park-and-ride facilities in each main transport corridor, and the development of a rapid transit network for the city.
	Turning specifically to rapid transit, the Belfast metropolitan transport plan indicates that the pilot stage of a rapid transit network could be implemented by 2015. It confirmed last year that EWAY remains the preferred option for the pilot—a selection that recognises the need to supplement conventional bus services in that transport corridor, which has not had a rail link for decades. The choice was strongly influenced by issues of practicality, as much of the land for the scheme was already in the Department's ownership.
	The hon. Gentleman will be aware that EWAY emerged from work by Translink in 1998–99, which examined a wide range of transport options for the Newtownards corridor. That work concluded that any future public transport system in the corridor should be bus-based, as forecast levels of demand were not sufficient to justify more expensive rail-based systems, as the hon. Gentleman said. Furthermore, economic analysis showed that the best-performing schemes would use the old railway line as a busway, a road or a combination of the two. Those studies contributed to the development of the transport initiatives included in the Belfast metropolitan transport plan.
	The hon. Gentleman will remember that work was undertaken at the same time to examine the technical feasibility and costs of EWAY. The preferred option, which emerged from that work, involves building a new road between Quarry Corner and East Link road for both rapid transport and other traffic. A park-and-ride site at Millmount would have access by new link roads to both the Newtownards and Comber catchment areas. For 5 km of the route, the rapid transit system would run along the former Comber railway on a dedicated busway using kerb-guidance technology. The design of that section would also incorporate provision for walking and cycling. Any delays owing to general traffic on the section between Holywood arches and the city centre would be minimised through the implementation of bus priority measures.
	I know that many in Belfast wanted a more aspirational transport system such as a tram system or a light rail system like those in Manchester or Sheffield. The hon. Gentleman has recognised that that would be very expensive. Work carried out by Translink and the Department suggests that the type of system that best meets overall objectives is one that uses guided-bus technology. The hon. Gentleman will be familiar with such systems. Indeed, he referred to his exploratory visits to France and Australia when he was Minister for Regional Development. Advances in vehicle design mean that newer vehicles, which make bus-based solutions even more attractive to the travelling public, have come on to the market.
	The hon. Gentleman also referred to the Secretary of State's visit this week to the constituency of the hon. Member for North Antrim (Rev. Ian Paisley). The Secretary of State took the opportunity to visit the Wright Group, which has developed a suitable vehicle, the streetcar, in Ballymena. That vehicle, which is almost 20 m long, looks like a modern tram, but it is free from the restriction of having to operate only where there are rails on the road. It can carry more than 100 passengers; it is fully wheelchair accessible; it has high quality seating; and it has other facilities such as screens providing passenger information.
	The success of the pilot EWAY scheme will dictate the extent of further development of the rapid transit network for Greater Belfast. The Belfast plan identifies three other possible routes, and implementation has been proposed for after 2015. The three routes include a rapid transit route from Belfast city centre to west Belfast, a new route linking Belfast city centre and Belfast City airport through the Titanic quarter of the Harbour estate in the Bangor corridor, and a super route in the Downpatrick corridor.
	Moving from the vision to the reality, there has been a steady decline in the number of people travelling on public transport in the Belfast metropolitan area. As the hon. Gentleman knows, the trend began long before the publication of the regional transportation strategy. The good news is that last year the figures began to rise for the first time, but they have still not returned to the baseline level on which the regional transportation strategy targets were based.
	Translink has being working on a programme of change for the future, ensuring that new and better services are provided for more people now. For example, the launch of Metro signalled a radical change in the delivery of bus services in Belfast and Greater Belfast. The Metro network in Belfast is operated by modern, accessible low-floor vehicles. Translink is committed to the ongoing improvement of its Metro network to maximise the performance of its services for its customers, and a second phase of improvements to Metro services is being developed. In the forthcoming months, Translink will undertake a fundamental review of the Metro network in conjunction with the General Consumer Council.
	These are early days, but the results are encouraging for the people of Belfast and Greater Belfast. Passenger numbers on Metro have increased by 7 per cent., which represents 27,000 extra passenger journeys every week. In addition, passenger numbers have continued to grow on Translink's Goldline services, which are showing a 16 per cent. increase. Translink is also working hard to deliver better Northern Ireland railway services. The new state-of-the-art trains and the new timetable have increased capacity by up to 50 per cent. on the Portadown-Belfast-Bangor corridor and have attracted new passengers. Ongoing infrastructure improvements at stations and the completion of the Larne line relay will further contribute to this step change in Northern Ireland railway services, which will ultimately deliver significant benefits to passengers in the Belfast metropolitan area and across Northern Ireland.
	To that end, Roads Service and Translink are working together to establish a quality bus corridor programme to complement the operation of high-frequency accessible bus services on the Belfast Metro network. Quality bus corridors involve improving traffic management and providing bus lanes to ensure that buses are able to run on time, together with more bus stops, shelters and service information for passengers.
	Let me turn to the immediate priorities for my Department. EWAY sits within a 10-year plan. For now, however, it is essential that we make hard choices and decide on the significant priorities that we must set across the whole transportation programme for Northern Ireland. As the hon. Gentleman said, transport investment decisions are crucial to the economic success not only of Belfast and Greater Belfast but of all Northern Ireland. EWAY has a crucial future role for Greater Belfast, but for the moment we still have to set our priorities within the Department.
	The successes that we are now seeing in public transport have resulted from these correct priorities being set and continuing to be set in the immediate budgetary processes. Let me give one or two examples. With the Department's support, Translink has completed the purchase of 190 new buses and is being assisted to provide more than 350 vehicles to replace some of its ageing bus fleet at an overall cost of nearly £50 million. Other capital investments include the relay of the Bleach Green to Whitehead rail track at an estimated cost of £25 million, the provision of an £11.4 million train cleaning facility at Fortwilliam to accommodate Northern Ireland Railways' 23 new trains, and budget cover of £11 million to improve bus and railway stations. We have also been able to provide £93 million over the 2004 budget period for the development of the core railway network. The budget for the concessionary fares scheme is some £19 million per annum. The scheme provides free and concessionary travel to several categories of people, including children, older people and people with disabilities. That is a recurring and increasing commitment for the Department as more concession pass holders are attracted to use better quality and accessible public transport services.
	EWAY is a large, complex and expensive concept, and, as the hon. Gentleman knows, there have been concerns about its immediate affordability. The estimated cost of implementing the pilot EWAY scheme is £96.2 million. The planning cost of the other rapid transit schemes is estimated at several millions more. The implementation of the EWAY proposals, as with all major schemes, will be dependent on, and subject to, detailed economic appraisal, funding availability and statutory processes. Initial and limited economic assessments of the scheme were not conclusive, but indicated that there was a realistic possibility that a bus rapid transit might have a positive net present value.
	The future of a rapid transit scheme depends on the budgetary climate at the time, competing priorities, the procurement process used, and perhaps the level of risk that can be transferred to private sector interests. The Strategic Investment Board is fully involved in the consideration of this major infrastructure project. It recently commissioned a report to provide high-level guidance on issues that need to be addressed when considering rapid transit options. The Strategic Investment Board's skills and expertise are being used to advise and assist the Department in identifying private finance opportunities.
	The hon. Gentleman referred to the idea of an EWAY transport group. I find that interesting and I believe that we should explore it. At the beginning of his speech, he referred to the importance of all-party consensus on the initiative. If he would like to pursue the idea—I believe that we should do so—perhaps he would consider whether it is possible for him to chair an all-party transport group about it. It would be extremely effective and important for the people who live in Greater Belfast.
	The opportunities for expanding such schemes are obvious. The hon. Gentleman rightly referred to the advantages for the economy in Belfast and it would be a great shame if the skill and expertise that he amassed as Minister for Regional Development were lost. There is a genuine opportunity for him to become involved in that. However, an all-party basis is essential. The hon. Gentleman rightly made a virtue of the fact that he achieved agreement when he was Minister for Regional Development by bringing about cross-party consensus in the Assembly. I believe that, if he was prepared to consider chairing such an all-party transport group, it would be a constructive way forward.
	We may wish to consider other proposals. We had explored the scheme in the context of an overall investment of £100 million in one go. I have been discussing with my officials proposals for considering breaking up the scheme into several components. For example, we have been examining the park-and-ride scheme and whether to consult bus companies about its use. We might be able to consider building the Millmount park-and-ride scheme and perhaps find a bus company that was prepared to work with that. If the hon. Gentleman considers chairing an all-party transport group, he will want to examine whether that, among other ideas, is a runner. The idea of building the Millmount park-and-ride scheme as a separate project from the overall scheme should not be lost on the hon. Gentleman. I do not believe that it would be lost on several people who want to commute in Greater Belfast. The scheme has considerable merit.
	The hon. Gentleman asked whether it would be possible to introduce more private sector money. We have explored that and we will continue to do so. We are in some consultation with bus companies about the extent to which they would consider being involved in putting up preparatory moneys to explore the matter.
	There is no doubt about the merit of EWAY for Belfast, Greater Belfast and Northern Ireland. In the compass of the Belfast metropolitan transport plan, I hope that EWAY becomes a reality by 2015. I can think of no finer individual than the hon. Gentleman to help us to ensure that, with all-party consensus, it is achieved.
	Question put and agreed to.
	Adjourned accordingly at seven minutes to Five o'clock.